Charitable Behaviour and the Big Five Personality Traits: Evidence from UK Panel Data

This paper investigates the association between personality traits and charitable behaviour, namely donations of time and money, using data from Understanding Society, the most recent large scale UK longitudinal household survey. Due to the censored nature of the outcome variables, i.e. some individuals do not engage in charitable behaviour, we employ tobit and censored quantile regression models. Personality traits are classified according to the ‘Big Five’ taxonomy: openness to experience; conscientiousness; extraversion; agreeableness; and neuroticism. In general, after conditioning on an extensive set of controls, conscientiousness and neuroticism are found to be inversely related to donating time and money, whilst openness to experience, which has a positive effect, is the dominant trait in terms of magnitude. Interestingly, personality traits are found to have a stronger correlation with donations of time and money at the extreme points of the distribution of donations relative to that at the median, thereby highlighting the additional information revealed by the quantile approach.